The Cisco Nexus® 2000 Series Fabric Extenders comprise a category of data center products designed to simplify data center access architecture and operations. The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series uses the Cisco® fabric extender architecture to provide a highly scalable unified server-access platform across a range of 100 Megabit Ethernet 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified fabric copper and fiber connectivity and rack and blade server environments. The platform is well suited to support today's traditional 1 Gigabit Ethernet environments while allowing transparent migration to 10 Gigabit Ethernet virtual machine-aware unified fabric technologies.

The Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders behave like remote line cards for a parent Cisco Nexus switch. The fabric extenders are essentially extensions of the parent Cisco Nexus switch fabric with the fabric extenders and the parent switch together forming a distributed modular system. This architecture enables physical topologies with the flexibility and benefits of both top-of-rack (ToR) and end-of-row (EoR) deployments.